American Nightmare The Ballad of Richard Jewell. The search warrant was short and succinct, dated August 3, 9 4. F. B. I. special agent Diader Rosario was instructed to produce hair samples twenty five pulled image photos5. Richard Allensworth Jewell. That Saturday, Atlanta was humid the temperature would rise to 8. There were 3. 4 Olympic events scheduled, including womens team handball, but Richard Jewell was in his mothers apartment playing Defender on a computer set up in the spare bedroom. Image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_960/image.jpg' alt='Brooks Buford Suspicious Package Downtown' title='Brooks Buford Suspicious Package Downtown' />Jewell hadnt slept at all the night before, or the night before that. He could hear the noise from the throng of reporters massed on the hill outside the small apartment in the suburbs. All morning long, he had been focused on the screen, trying to score off the little guy who goes back and forth shooting the aliens, but at 1. Very few people had his new number, by necessity unlisted. Since the F. B. I. Olympic Park bombing suspect three days earlier, Jewell had received approximately l,0. On July 30, 1996, the media identified Richard Jewell as the F. B. I. s prime suspect in the Olympic Park bombing. For the first time, the 34yearold security guard. Internet. Ill be right over, his lawyer Watson Bryant told him. They want your hair, they want your palm prints, and they want something called a voice exemplarthe goddamn bastards. The curtains were drawn in the pastel apartment filled with his mothers crafts and samplers a home without a dog is just a house, one read. By this time Bryant had a system. He would call Jewell from his car phone so that the door could be unlatched and Bryant could avoid the questions from the phalanx of reporters on the hill. Turning into the parking lot in a white Explorer, Bryant could see sound trucks parked up and down Buford Highway. The middle class neighborhood of apartment complexes and shopping centers was near the De. Kalb Peachtree Airport, where local millionaires kept their private planes. The moment Bryant got out of his car, the reporters began to shout Hey, Watson, do they have the murderer Are they arresting Jewell Bryant moved quickly toward the staircase to the Jewells apartment. He wore a baseball cap, khaki shorts, and a frayed Brooks Brothers polo shirt. He was 4. 5 years old, with strong features and thinning hair, a southern preppy from a country club family. Bryant had a stern demeanor lightened by a contrarians sense of the absurd. He was often distractedfrom time to time he would miss his exits on the highwayand he had the regional tendency of defining himself by explaining what he was not. I am not a Democrat, because they want your money. I am not a Republican, because they take your rights away, he told me soon after I met him. JPG/jcr:content/renditions/cq5dam.web.1280.1280.jpeg' alt='Brooks Buford Suspicious Package Downtown' title='Brooks Buford Suspicious Package Downtown' />Bryant can talk your ear off about the Bill of Rights, ending with a flourish I think everyone ought to have the right to be stupid. I am a Libertarian. At the time Richard Jewell was named as a suspect by the F. B. I., Watson Bryant made a modest living by doing real estate closings in the suburbs, but Jewell and his lawyer had formed an unusual friendship a decade earlier, when Jewell worked as a mailroom clerk at a federal disaster relief agency where Bryant practiced law. Jewell was then a stocky kid without a father, who had trained as an auto mechanic but dreamed of being a policeman Bryant had always had a soft spot for oddballs and strays, a personality quirk which annoyed his then wife no end. Avast Edition here. The serendipity of this friendship, an alliance particularly southern in its eccentricity, would bring Watson Bryant to the immense task of attempting to save Richard Jewell from the murky quagmire of a national terrorism case. The simple fact was that Bryant had no qualifications for the job. He had no legal staff except for his assistant, Nadya Light, no contacts in the press, and no history in Washington. He was the opposite of media savvy he rarely read the papers and never watched the nightly news, preferring the Discovery Channels shows on dog psychology. Now that Richard Jewell was his client, he had entered a zone of worldwide media hysteria fraught with potential peril. Jewell suspected that his pickup truck had been flown in a C 1. F. B. I. unit at Quantico in Virginia, and Bryant worried that his friend would be arrested any minute. Worse, Bryant knew that he had nothing going for him, no levers anywhere. His only asset was his personality he had the bravado and profane hyperbole of a southern rich boy, but he was in way over his head. Brooks Buford Suspicious Package Downtown' title='Brooks Buford Suspicious Package Downtown' />For hours that Saturday, Bryant and Jewell sat and waited for the F. B. I. From time to time Jewell would put binoculars under the drawn curtain in his mothers bedroom to peer at the reporters on the hill. Bryant was nervous that Jewells mother, Bobi, would return from baby sitting and see her son having hairs pulled out of his head. Bryant stalked around the apartment complaining about the F. B. I. The sons of bitches did not show up until three p. The F. B. I. medic was tall and muscular and wore rubber gloves. He asked Jewell to sit at a small round table in the living room, where his mother puts her holiday theme displays. Bryant stood by the sofa next to a portrait of Jewell in his Habersham County deputys uniform. He watched the F. B. I. procedure carefully. The medic, who had huge hands, used tiny drugstore tweezers. He eyeballed his scalp and took his hair in sections. First he ran a comb through it, and then he took these hairs and plucked them out one by one. Jewell went stone cold, but Bryant could not contain his temper. I am his lawyer. I know you can have this, I know you have a search warrant, but I tell you this If you were doing this to me, you would have to fight me. You would have to beat the shit out of me, Bryant recalled telling the case agent Ed Bazar. Bazar, Bryant later said, was apologetic. Black Swan Dual here. He seemed almost embarrassed to be there. As he counted out the hairs, he placed them in an envelope. The irony of the situation was not lost on Bryant. He was a lawyer, an officer of the court, but he had a disdain for authority, and he was representing a former deputy who read the Georgia law code for fun in his spare time. It took 1. 0 minutes to pluck Jewells thick auburn hair. Then the F. B. I. That took 3. 0 minutes, and they got ink all over the table, Bryant said. Then Bazar told Bryant they wanted Jewell to sit on the sofa and say into the telephone, There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 3. 0 minutes. That was the message given by the 9. He was to repeat the message 1. Bryant saw the possibility of phony evidence and of his clients going to jail. I said, I am not sure about this. Maybe you can do this, maybe you cant, but you are not doing this today. All afternoon, Jewell was strangely quiet. He had a sophisticated knowledge of police work and believed, he later said, they must have had some evidence if they wanted my hair. I knew their game was intimidation. That is why they brought five agents instead of two. He felt violated and humiliated, he told me, but he was passive, even docile, through Bryants outburst. He thought of the bombing victimsAlice Hawthorne, the 4. Albany, Georgia, at the park with her stepdaughter Melih Uzunyol, the Turkish cameraman who died of a heart attack the more than 1. I kept thinking, These guys think I did this. These guys were accusing me of murder. This was the biggest case in the nation and the world. If they could pin it on me, they were going to put me in the electric chair. I met Richard Jewell three months later, on October 2. Jewell to speak publicly for the first time since the F. B. I. had cleared him.